I Do Want What I Have Not Got

A couple of years ago I was visiting my brother and he seemed like a changed man. It wasn't just that he was over his latest divorce but rather, there was a genuine and deep change in him. I knew he'd been seeing a shrink since a rather spectacular (and very public) flame-out.

He's since stopped seeing the shrink. "One day he told me a story," Bro told me, "and it all just clicked. And I was fine."

A story?

One day I walked into a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop and ordered a slice of pepperoni pizza.
"We're an ice cream shop, sir, " said the guy at the counter. "We don't serve pizza here." I was angry. I wanted a piece of pizza but this guy wouldn't sell me a piece. "What do you mean you don't have pizza! You're a restaurant! You have food! I want a slice of pepperoni pizza!" I screamed.

"We only have ice cream, sir," the guy replied. I was furious and stormed out of the place screaming.

The next day I went back to the Baskin Robbins. There was the guy again. "Gimme a slice of pepperoni pizza, please," I asked him. "I'm sorry sir, but this is an ice cream parlour. We only have ice cream. We don't have pizza here."

I started screaming at him again. "What the hell are you talking about?! I don't want any ice cream. I just want a damned piece of pizza!" He just stood there shaking his head, saying, "I'm sorry sir, but I can't help you." I was fit to be tied and stormed out of the place, hungry as hell and cursing up a storm.

The next day I went back again. "How can I help you, sir?"

"Hi there," I said with a smile. "I'd like to have a slice of pepperoni pizza, please."

"Sir, I keep telling you, we're an ice cream parlour, not a pizzeria. If you want pizza there's a place around the corner that makes great pizza. But we only have ice cream here. I would love to give you some pizza but we don't have any. We just have ice cream."

I started banging my fists on the counter and screaming at the guy again. How dare he not serve me that stupid slice of pizza! I'm a paying customer! I want some pizza and this is a restaurant! I walked out furious and screaming some more.

Do you get it?

"And that's when I got it," said my brother. Yeah, I get it, too. If only such realisation could provide me the same calm it gave my brother you couldn't hide a basketball in that my-head-shaped-dent in front of my keyboard.

Buddy-boy doesn't get it, either.

We need to disable IE7 compatibility mode on the web server using custom headers

OK, fine. Do X, Y, and Z. Restart to clear all caches and Robert becomes the name of your father's brother.

Thanks for confirming disabling IE7 compatibility using {long, enumerated list of steps just in case}. Another part of my request you didn't answer was as how to confirm the results at the client side i.e. those settings are in effect i.e. how to confirm after making those changes that IE7 compatibility has been turned off. Are there any $YourBigApp logs that we can check?

A question I didn't answer perhaps because you didn't ask? No matter, the answer's simple. This is a Web server matter and as such, nothing we could log even if we wanted to. You'll know you've done it correctly if $OurBigApp works, which you've confirmed it now does. You can look in the Web server logs and contact the vendor if you need further data.

Not necessarily the answer I was looking for, I'll do some digging on my own.

You want that in a cone or a cup? Closed as a Root Cause: 6.5-No Customer Research with a side order of 17.

There's a NetApp for that

PRIO-1! PRIO-0! THE SKY IS FALLING! WE'RE DOOMED!! HAAAALLLP!!!

What a way to start the day. A quick look showed Srini works for $BigInterwebs who are still in development. You can't have a Prio-1 if you're in development, and if you want 'round the clock support, $MegaCorp makes you pay extra for it. So I don't feel too bad that it was almost lunch before I even see just the tip of this iceberg.

Reading through the problem, it was going to be after lunch before I answered it. The puppy needed feeds and it's marked Prio-3 (because that's what it is).

I'm not being as much of a dick as it seems. Srini is in California; his day starts after mine is well over, and thank fuck for that because it means he's unlikely to ever get up early enough to try calling me. Copypasta continues:

$YourBigApp %datastore% param has a limit of 255 char length since we are limited with 4 filesystem folders in our Production Environment so unable to include additional folders.Please let us know below are there any available options!!

1. Reference a config file to maintain this param value or any enhancement in future.
2. Any alternative to specify a way to store more folder names

A field length of 256 characters for the directory list should be able to allow even the least creative out there to specify at least 10 sub-directory location. And since one subdirectory can safely hold around 2.1 billion (~2³¹), it's going to be a special challenge to run out of room anytime soon. And I told him so, even explaining how to map and rename in a network-neutral sort of way.

And that was Srini taken care of. If only some of these other tickets were as easy.

This morning I logged in and the IM went nuts, popping up windows from four different mooks at Central who had tried to ping me about some ticket. There were more than a dozen mails all referring to the same damned ticket number. It dawned on me that I hadn't finished building a repro yesterday and this weird international sorting problem was a big deal for $EuroTelco...

And then I saw which company had the ticket number:

Escalate!! make the priority to 2!!

We have a limitation on the filer provided NetApp storage which can accomdate 91k files per folder but our environment creates around 40K files per day since we have trasncripts,email and other attachments. This is the defect..

You have NetApp storage? Which we don't support. Which we told you {clicky-clickety-click} a whole month ago we don't support. And you went and got it anyway even though it's unnecessary, a burden on our system, causes you a performance hit, and it can't hold more than two days' worth of your files in a directory?

Had you listed to us in the first place you'd have saved time and money and aggro and you'd have a system which, based on your stated fill rate of 41K docs a day, would be able to hold no fewer than 2004 years' worth of files.

Root Cause:17 - Fuckwit.
We already told you this shit but yeah, what do we know?